Your special purpose in life.

Yeah, not the special purpose talked about in the movie “The Jerk”.

Which happens to be a favorite around here with the boys. (I wonder why)

I’m talking about “THE ONE THING” you were “MEANT” to do.

That mystical, magical thing that you need to do in this life in order to leave your mark, to get where you are going, to unlock the door.

It seems, sometimes, that some of us get to midlife and we look back and wonder if we’ve done the ONE job we were sent here to do.

We wonder what that job is. We worry and fret wondering if we’ve missed our chance.

Sometimes, especially for those of us who gave up careers to stay home with children, we can feel like we’ve not even come close to realizing our potential. We’ve given all we had to our families but we’ve not done anything really IMPORTANT.

We can get a little blue that we haven’t done anything MAJOR with our lives. I’ve known some people to be very shaken by the idea that they’ve gotten this far and never done anything really, really BIG.

But honestly, it’s just the stuff of movies. At least that’s what I think.

I don’t think that the vast majority of us come here to cure cancer, invent vaccines that save lives or write great literary novels.

In fact, I think that most of us are just here to learn to be the best we can be.

We are here to learn to be better people, to love, and to soak up all the lessons this life has to offer before we move on to the next thing. Whatever you think the next thing might be. (It’s OK. You can believe whatever you want. We’re all friends here.)

To my way of thinking, our purpose is to reach out, to love, to show kindness, to learn and grow, to become.

Really. That’s all there is to it.

Your special purpose is to be YOU! The very best YOU that you can be.

Now, doesn’t that take some of the pressure off? Can you look back now on the life you’ve lived, look around at your family and the people you love and feel FULL? Can you look forward to learning, loving and becoming without the stress of being on the look out for that ONE THING?

Part of reinventing yourself and your life in midlife is to learn that perhaps being YOU is enough and using that as a springboard for your reinvention.

Being YOU is your purpose in life.